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SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket to launch NASA’s Roman Space Telescope
NASA has chosen SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket to launch its next major space telescope, a wide-field observatory that should directly complement the brand new James Webb Space Telescope.
Originally known as the Wide Field InfraRed Survey Telescope (WFIRST), NASA recently renamed the mission in honor of Nancy Grace Roman, a foundational force behind the Hubble Space Telescope. Fittingly, the Roman Space Telescope’s basic design is reminiscent of Hubble in many ways, owing to the fact that the mission exists solely because the US National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) chose to donate an unused multi-billion-dollar spy satellite – a satellite that was effectively a secret Earth-facing version of Hubble.
However, thanks to decades of improvements in electronics, electromechanics, and the instrumentation side of spacecraft and space telescopes, RST will be dramatically more capable than the Hubble telescope it resembles. And now, after a several-year fight for survival, the Roman Space Telescope officially has a ride to space – SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket.
Falcon Heavy continues to be a bit of a paradox, winning contract after contract for increasingly high-value flagship launches despite having not launched once in more than three years. It’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, at this point, as the major missions that are increasingly being entrusted to Falcon Heavy are far more likely to run into significant spacecraft-side delays. At one point in late 2021, for example, SpaceX had five Falcon Heavy launches tentatively planned in 2022 – all but one of which had already been delayed several months to a year or more. Seven months into 2022, not one of those missions has launched and it’s looking increasingly likely that Falcon Heavy will be lucky to fly at all this year.
Nonetheless, the Roman Space Telescope joins an impressive manifest that includes the multi-billion-dollar GOES-U weather satellite, NASA’s ~$5 billion Europa Clipper, two modules (HALO and PPE) of a Moon-orbiting space station, NASA’s Psyche asteroid explorer, a large Astrobotic Griffin lander carrying NASA’s VIPER Moon rover, two large geostationary communications satellites, and three missions for the US military. RST is the rocket’s 11th launch contract between now and the mid-2020s.
Despite having a similar resolving power, RST’s primary wide-field instrument will have a field of view 100 times greater than Hubble, meaning that the new telescope will be able to gather magnitudes more data in a similar time. Its primary goals include measuring “light from a billion galaxies over the course of the mission lifetime” and performing “a microlensing survey of the inner Milky Way to find ~2,600 exoplanets.” A second coronagraph instrument will “perform high-contrast imaging and spectroscopy of dozens of individual nearby exoplanets.” According to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, “the Coronagraph provides a crucial stepping stone in the preparation of future missions aiming to [directly] image and characterize Earth-like planets [that are] 10 billion times fainter than their host star.”
According to NASA, “the telescope’s science program also includes dedicated investigations to tackle outstanding questions [about the nature and] effects of dark energy and dark matter, as well as a substantial general investigator program to enable further studies of astrophysical phenomena to advance other science goals.”
Because RST is also focused on infrared wavelengths of light, it could be an excellent companion to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Whereas RST is a wide-field survey observatory that aims to observe and catalog billions of galaxies, stars, and planets, JWST’s far larger mirror is optimized for up-close observation of individual targets or deep gazes into tiny swaths of sky. RST could ultimately work a bit like an MRI or CAT scan to JWST’s biopsy, telling the surgeon where to look but only hinting at what it might find.
According to NASA, the ~$4.3 billion space telescope’s Falcon Heavy launch contract will cost an exceptionally steep $255 million to send the spacecraft to the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point about 800,000 kilometers (~500,000 mi) from Earth. NASA’s contract to launch the even more expensive Europa Clipper spacecraft all the way to Jupiter with a fully-expendable Falcon Heavy rocket is expected to cost less than $180 million.
NASA’s press release also claims that RST will be ready to launch as early as October 2026. A different press release from September 2021 did not mention the 2026 target and only noted that RST’s launch is scheduled no later than May 2027.
Tesla Full Self-Driving is now the centerpiece of the company’s newly revised Referral Program, which launched on October 29.
Instead of referring people to purchase vehicles and the referrer receiving $250 in Tesla Credit, the new program now incentivizes Full Self-Driving subscriptions.
If a Tesla owner is on an FSD trial and uses a referral code to subscribe to Full Self-Driving, the person whose Referral Link was used will receive one month of FSD (Supervised). Their code can be utilized 12 times per year, with January 1 marking the reset date.
Realistically, this means that if your Referral Code is used by 12 Tesla owners on an FSD trial, you will receive a full year of FSD for free.
🚨 Here is Tesla’s new Referral Program for Full Self-Driving (Supervised):
When someone subscribes to FSD using your link, you’ll get a month free. Up to a year of FSD is available to you for free!
If you’d like to use my link: https://t.co/g00IX9OCE3 https://t.co/GFBzEO2jjS
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) October 30, 2026
The previous program made it pretty difficult to get referrals; buying a vehicle is obviously a much larger financial strain than subscribing to Full Self-Driving for a month.
Of course, the previous Referral Program also offered a tangible benefit: $250 in credits you could use on Service, Supercharging, or anything in the Tesla Shop. It truly could pay for someone’s travel for a year. It recently bought me a new backpack and a T-shirt.
However, this new program is much more attainable for those who do not have a massive online presence of a slew of friends in the Tesla community who will use the code and max out subscriptions for vehicle purchases.
Woke up to maxed out Referrals! Thank you guys, that’s awesome!
Share your referral link below so others can use it! https://t.co/kesbwTcoTV
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) October 30, 2026
The Full Self-Driving suite will now be the keystone of the Referral Program, which makes it more inclusive and more fun for everyone with an awesome benefit.
It also gives the impression that Tesla is truly focused on FSD subscriptions, something that saw a tremendous increase in volume in Q3, as 75 percent of deliveries for the quarter came with an FSD subscription attached.
Full Self-Driving data is so instrumental to the suite’s improvement that this kind of program benefits Tesla as much as it does the consumer.
Elon Musk
Tesla made napping in a Robotaxi easier with its latest update
Tesla’s quiet mode reaches Model Y Robotaxis, blacking out the screen for riders wanting rest.
Tesla’s quiet mode, the setting that blacks out the screen for riders who want to rest, has moved beyond the Cybercab. A video posted Thursday by Spencer (@scotsrule08) shows the feature running in a Model Y Robotaxi on a night ride that appears to be in Dallas.
New quiet mode now on @Robotaxi https://t.co/2cM2eM9NeN — Spencer (@scotsrule08) October 29, 2026
The rider taps a small crescent moon icon in the bottom right corner of the map screen. The map, media player, app shortcuts and Grok prompt disappear, leaving a dark display with “Arriving soon,” the destination and a line reading “Tap display to exit quiet mode.” Controls a passenger may still need, including Pull Over, cabin temperature, volume and Support, stay visible. One tap anywhere brings the full map back.
Quiet mode first showed up in the Cybercab last week, which Teslarati reported alongside a new rear camera view. Tesla has been trimming cabin noise in other ways too. On October 25, Spencer reported that Robotaxi turn signals now chime for the first four blinks and then go silent. Tesla has not published release notes for either change.
Elon Musk has been pitching this use for more than a decade. In October 2014, he said that “maybe five or six years from now I think we’ll be able to achieve true autonomous driving where you could literally get in the car, go to sleep and wake up at your destination,”
By 2017 he was setting a higher bar. Speaking at TED, Musk said the hard part was not making self-driving work 99.9 percent of the time, “because, like, if a car crashes one in a thousand times, then you’re probably still not going to be comfortable falling asleep. You shouldn’t be, certainly.”
Owners asked for something similar in their own cars. In December 2019, a Tesla owner requested a Nap Mode that would keep the climate running and wake the occupant with an alarm, and Musk answered “Ok,” as Teslarati covered at the time.
The line returned when the Cybercab was unveiled at the We, Robot event in October 2024. “We’ll move from supervised Full Self-Driving to unsupervised Full Self-Driving, where you can fall asleep and wake up at your destination,” Musk said. On Tesla’s first quarter earnings call in April 2025, he called it the deciding measure: “The acid test is, can you go to sleep in your car and wake up in your destination and I’m confident that will be available in many cities in the US by the end of this year,”
Tesla has run driverless Model Y rides in Dallas and Houston since April, so a passenger dozing off on the way home is now a realistic use of the button. Tesla is also offering new riders a free first trip in both cities, according to an in-app screen shared by tracker Ethan McKanna, and said on its third quarter call that Cybercab rides would launch in Dallas next month.
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FCC green lights SpaceX’s move to a showdown with Verizon and AT&T
The FCC advanced plans opening 482 MHz to satellite phone service, boosting SpaceX’s Starlink Mobile.
The Federal Communications Commission voted Thursday to move forward with a proposal that would open an additional 482 MHz of spectrum to satellite service beamed directly to ordinary phones, a step that could widen the road for SpaceX’s Starlink Mobile to compete with the country’s largest wireless carriers.
The commission adopted the notice of proposed rulemaking at its October open meeting in Washington, Reuters reported. The proposal would raise the number of bands eligible for Supplemental Coverage from Space from five to 13, according to the FCC fact sheet. Commissioners also advanced a companion item proposing an auction of 25 MHz in the 1675 to 1695 MHz and 2020 to 2025 MHz bands, which could be used for terrestrial service, direct to device service or both.
Thursday’s vote does not hand any spectrum to SpaceX. It opens a public comment period, and final rules will come later. Under the draft, comments would be due 60 days after the notice is published in the Federal Register. The FCC had not released the adopted text at the time of writing, so it is not yet clear whether any bands were changed before the vote.
That question is where the fight now moves. AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, through industry group CTIA, asked the FCC to drop the 2.5 GHz and 3.45 GHz bands, which make up 290 MHz of the 482 MHz on the table, as Teslarati reported ahead of the vote. T-Mobile argued satellite interference could wipe out up to 96% of a cell site’s uplink coverage area. SpaceX asked the commission to go the other way and add the 902 to 928 MHz band.
The rule change that matters most to SpaceX may be a structural one. Today, a satellite operator must lease spectrum from every carrier holding co-channel licenses across an entire region such as the contiguous United States. The proposal would replace that with a certification that the operator has coexistence agreements covering only the areas it plans to serve, or that it holds the terrestrial licenses itself.
SpaceX has spent this year building that second path. It bought EchoStar’s AWS-4 and H-block licenses in a deal worth roughly $17 billion, and earlier this month agreed to acquire Grain Management’s nationwide 800 MHz portfolio, which the company said would pave the way for Starlink to become a major US mobile carrier. The FCC approved SpaceX’s purchase of three unused AWS-3 licenses from Tristar on October 21, and cleared its plan for 15,000 next generation direct to cell satellites on October 6.
The regulator has not always sided with SpaceX. In April, the FCC dismissed a SpaceX petition seeking access to Mobile Satellite Service spectrum held by incumbents, and it rejected 2.5 GHz for satellite coverage when it first adopted the framework in 2024.
The carriers are also building their own defenses. In May, the three companies agreed in principle to form a joint venture pooling spectrum for satellite service, and T-Mobile remains SpaceX’s US launch partner for Starlink Mobile even as it leads the push to keep satellites out of 2.5 GHz. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell has said service on SpaceX’s own airwaves is targeted for early 2028.
Tesla Full Self-Driving becomes main pillar of new Referral Program
Tesla made napping in a Robotaxi easier with its latest update
